Man Or Monster Developer Blog #3: The Monsters!

Last week, we took a look at the hero of Man Or Monster… so it’s time to get up close to the monsters themselves! If you choose to play as a monster, you can take your pick from 11 behemoths and carve a path of destruction through cities in the game world. Man or Monster developer Diederik Groesbeek gave us his insight into the beasts that inhabit the game.

The Monster Mash

“The early build of the game had just one monster – a green Godzilla-like creature that we’d made for testing – although we actually came to realize that he looked quite a lot like Mario’s nemesis, Bowser! As we developed the game further, we decided that he looked a bit too friendly and cartoony so changed up his appearance. We made him purple (yes, purple monsters can still look scary). To reflect his slightly more menacing look, we also took to calling him Bad Browser, because everyone in web game development knows browsers are evil…

Purple can still be mean-looking.

“And then we started to make the rest of them! We took a lot of inspiration from classic monster movies and kept this in mind while we were creating the places that they’d end up destroying – we just couldn’t resist having a big ape wreck New York City, and a giant robot destroy Tokyo.

“We took a lot of inspiration from classic monster movies.”

When you look at most action games, you almost always play the hero. We wanted to give you the choice – you can save the world as the Man, or, if you feel like trashing a city or two, you can enjoy doing that as a Monster.

We’ve tried to make playing as the Monster feel like you really are a hundred feet tall, towering above a city. You can equip your monster with special abilities like fireballs, a high speed dash attack… and even weaponized flatulence. My personal favorite is probably the Minion Attack, in which you spit out black critters that run around the city eating civilians.”

Creature Feature

“We created 3 monster classes that the games’ monsters fit into: Zilla (dinosaur), Kong (ape) and Mutant (humanoid) which help to define how they move. Once you’ve unlocked a new monster, its body parts are made available to use on other monsters of the same class in the Monster Shop menu. So you can customize the colors and special attacks of your monster before you go out to flatten a city.

We wanted to make it possible for the player to create any type of monster they wanted. However, it just wasn’t technically do-able to have dinosaur-like small arms on a big gorilla body – despite how hilariously awesome it sounds.”

Customize your beast in the Monster Shop.

“You can piece together monster body parts to create unique combinations – we’re really excited to see what people come up with when the game launches! The Daily Challenges will have some special monster combinations too so make sure you look out for those.

There are going to be 11 monsters in the game, although we would love to create some new classes and new ways of customization for an update. It would be awesome if you could play as a Kraken or even Ghidorah.”

One of the monsters that didn’t make the cut

“When we designed our monsters we outlined them directly in our 3D modeling package. Then we recreate it in ‘cubes’ inside Qubicle Constructor, and then we export it back to our modeling package for rigging, animation and optimization. We wanted each monster to look distinct from each other, but to also have a link to the city they were attacking, like the wolfman in London and the giant ape in New York. The monsters tower over buildings and the humans below look like ants, empowering the player to cause all sorts of carnage.”

What’s in a name?

“We’re actually still finalizing the names for each monster at the moment – there have been some brilliant suggestions (and some hilarious ones). Hopefully we can share some of them with you when the game gets released! We don’t want to spoil the surprise until you’ve had a chance to play it and discover some of our monsters for yourselves…”

The game is really fabulous. I enjoy every moment of playing it. I really like it and i even start my own blog to introduce people with the game. Keep on working on the game and bring us new monsters and army! 🙂